It's the first time that i ran across this SF audio blog. It turned up in another of my damned Borges searches. This post has a link to the New Yorker podcast in which Paul Theroux reads the Borges story The Gospel According to Mark.
It would sound good to say that work has been eating up my work time, but it hasn't. Another few weeks of backlog video appeared, but eh... i'm used to it. The real distraction from blogging has been playing Civ 4, with the Beyond the Sword expansion, during my downtime. It was born of rainy days, and just restless enough not to be able to focus on reading.
Because of Thanksgiving, i took my eye off the ball. Among many things, Russia's election is going to be a mess as expected.
Kasparov has been detained. Bill explained to me that he believes that Kasparov might possibly be seeking martyrdom, as he has no real chance in the election, but in death, he can provide a rallying point for reform. Now that he's detained, assassination is probably unnecessary.
Bush saw Putin's soul though, so it's all going to be all right, isn't it?
The story is not as strong as the title sounds actually. When tasers were first introduced, they made sense, in using nonlethal force to disarm a violent criminal. As law enforcement grows accustomed to the weapon, they are now obviously using them haphazardly, against anyone who resists, physically or merely verbally. Tasers incapacitate through administration of extreme pain. That is a classic definition of torture.
I'm eager to see the use of tasers being more stringently regulated. Banning them altogether is not necessary, as guns will probably always be around. However, most of the tasers stories that i read lately have police using tasers essentially as cattle prods in ordinary disturbances, not ones in which anyone's life is in danger.
A good mystery story is fun:
(AGI) - Rome, 21st November - In the Balochistan desert, a city burned down long ago, a mysterious necropolis, a five thousand-year-old tomb, the skeleton of a woman, with a golden eye. This is the real-life mystery of a discovery in Iran, at Shahr-i Sokta on the border with Afghanistan, of the remains of a shaman - the custodian, according to tradition, of secret lore. The discovery was made at the end of 2006 by Iranian archaeologists under the direction of M. Sajjadi from the Iranian Centre for Archaeological Research, with assistance from an Italian mission which has been wording in the area since 1967 on funds supplied by the Foreign Office, the Ministries of Heritage and the Museum of Oriental Art of Italy's Institute for Africa and the Orient(ISIAO) formerly ISMEO the institution founded by that great explorer of that territory, Giuseppe Tucci. But the story of the priestess with the golden eye is still there to be written, and a new mission will be on its way on 30 November to carry on with Shahr-i Sokhta's investigations, to re-start analysis of the eye prosthesis in collaboration with their Iranian colleagues. The woman was 1 metre 82 centimetres in height with African physiognomy, a pronounced jaw, perhaps dark-skinned. "The find was made by Iranian archaeologists working in the vast necropolis - Lorenzo Costantini, head of the Italian mission to Shahr-i Sokta, told AGI. The city is located on the frontier with Battriana which was a cross-roads for caravans coming from the West, headed for the Orient. The burial, according to my calculations, is 5,000 years old". The gold eye was set in the right socket. And this is how the scientists found her. They have tried to find similar finds in archaeological history, but without success.
The Kindle device was leaving me nonplussed. I like reading books because they are books. It gives me a very different feeling from reading chunks of text online. I completely ignored Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road when it came out in serial, as i couldn't be bothered to read it online, knowing that it would be better enjoyed when it would be collected in a book.
Bookninja suggests something very obvious that i ignored completely. Reference books. Yeah, that would be useful. I already carry one bird book around with m all of the time (National Geographic, because it has paintings, not photos, and the range maps are on the same page as the pictures.) It would be kinda cool to carry books around for insects, reptiles, flowers, ect. or just cram it full of Wikipedia entires. However, the Kindle does not look much more robust than a laptop. And 30 hours of battery life? Why bother?
Yeah, i'm unconvinced. It looks like an utterly useless device.
Ed Champion has ten arguments against it.
Obviously, the transhumanists are going to be all over this Muscular Thin Films technology. The technology is coating a silicon-based organic polymer with heart muscle cells that react to electrical stimuli, which are then easily cut off into sheets. The video shows that the sheets have semi-motility in swimming with this simple motion.
It would be most interesting to see if this can be used to create probes for deep sea exploration. There will be more advanced applications (artificial arms in ten years?) but when i see "swimming" robots, no matter how small, that's what pops into my head.
Cryptomundo has a long post noting the death of Teuku Jacob last month on October 17th. In no way am i gloating, but it will be interesting to see if research on the fossils identified as Homo floresiensis will move forward now.
That Batman Does Dostoevsky post has been popping up in blog posts for months, but when i was trawling through the past week's comics, i caught something a lot more subtle (for comics anyway,) but just as peculiarly literary. I was reading the new Captain Marvel comic to find a scene in which a SHIELD agent meets with Iron Man telepathically. Yep, it's a comic. They meet inside of a memory of the agent, and in it, she's the size of a child, in the home of her French grandmother. She and Iron Man sit around chatting, eating cookies, and remarking on how good they are, with the agent adding something about they are just the way that she remembers them.
No, it's not much, but it seems an obvious and gratuitous Proust reference and it's funny to see it in a mainstream underwear pervert comic. Since the whole comic's theme dwells on memory, i'm wondering if it's about more than the cookie.
Never read Proust myself. Never seemed like my cup of tea, even though Pamuk and Vila-Matas adore him.
There's a post about two million years old human fossils that were discovered over the past twenty years in Wushan County in Chongqing municipality in China over on Remote Central.
Stumbled across an interesting review of a book called <span style="font-style:italic;">The Lost Books of The Odyssey: A Novel by Zachary Mason on Starcherone Books that looks pretty good. It's not out until March of 2008 though. There is more on it on the Stacherone blog. And the author is no workshop hack:
Zachary Mason is a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. He got his B.S. at Harvey Mudd and his Ph.D. at Brandeis. He works for a Silicon Valley start-up. In recent months he has had short stories accepted by Pleiades and The Journal of Literary Imagination. This is his first novel. He is currently working on another novel about the mythology and culture of AI's
Interview with Orhan Pamuk. Am I an idiot for being more interested in this novel than Museum of Innocence?
Pamuk: Yes, I have an unfinished novel, which is 25 years old, a Dostoyevskian political novel, in which radical leftist thought is melded with mystic demonism. But when we had our military coup in 1980 it became impossible to publish that novel. It was at that point in time I realized, not without shock, that some of my old Marxist friends were being tempted by radical Islam and its anti-Western logorrhea.
A review of Umberto Eco's On Ugliness on the Village Voice. It seems the reviewer judges it to be a lesser work, born of prior research. He also declares it to be Eurocentric, which is a bit obvious, in that this is Umberto Eco here. Why on earth would we expect him to start writing about Africa and Japan at this age?
Admittedly, i don't expect much from this book. It's essays from Eco. That's enough for me, so the reviewer's expectations seem too high.
As much as i get my jollies on slagging America this week, there might be something a little off about these numbers used for this article:
In Germany 13% of books are translations. In France it's 27%, in Spain 28%, in Turkey 40% and in Slovenia 70%, but in Britain and America the best estimates suggest that the fraction of books on the shelves which started off in another language is somewhere around two per cent.
This pirated Chinese dubbed version of Arrested Development, with English subtitles drawn from Chinese dubs, and not the original English scripts, seems oddly suited to the nature of Arrested Development.
I wonder if there is another step of Mandarin to Cantonese or vice versa, that is being left out.
Mitalipov's work was the first convincing evidence that skin cells in primates can be reprogrammed into stem cells. "This takes us several steps closer to the production of patient-specific stem cells to treat life-limiting conditions."
Perhaps i shall have fresh, new monkey eyes in the event that i do have this pre-mature onset glaucoma nonsense. Yes, the immediate future is curing disease, not growing organs in vats, i'm so it goes.
I cracked open that copy of Darconville's Cat last month, but keep skipping back to other books.
Theroux has a new book, Laura Warholic: or The Sexual Intellectual, his first novel in twenty years, and it being put out by.... Fantagraphics? Interesting.
There's an interview over on Los Angeles City Beat. This bit tickled me:
Like his description of Eyestones, Theroux is possessed of an “assemblagist’s imagination” and an “encyclopedic knowledge of many unlikely subjects.” “Every writer writes the book he wants to read is a truism I would subscribe to,” he explains. Theroux’s books, for example, pullulate with lists. “I love lists, the taxonomy of a subject gathered in. The headline for the review of Darconville’s Cat in the New York Times Book Review was ‘Awash with Lists.’ It was a grudging review written by a peevish little cucurbit who spitefully and arbitrarily chose to blame me for a literary device – lists – that other writers of the encyclopedic novel, Francois Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, to name but a few, were not only praised for but revered in the department of invention.”
If we're going to have one, i'm sticking with Huckleberry Finn, damn it.
I read this article in response to the death of Mailer, and am suspicious of the writer's assessment of the current batch of writers who just might one day be of Great American Writers. Blah.
(Lethem has definitely published within the past four or five years, even if i think his novel from 2007 sucks. And anyone seriously pegging hopes on Eggers? Come on.)
Has anyone stopped to assess why there is no great American novel approaching on the horizon? Maybe it's because America is over. The sentence seems important:
Analysing class, as Updike and Ford once did so brilliantly, is no longer an acceptable subject in US fiction.
Where is the Great American Novel to be found today? Does anyone still care enough about writing an unprecedented masterpiece, to amaze and dismay his or her rival scribes, and offer the world a metaphor of America that will stick?
It's over on the sidebar. Don't know if i will use it that much. Currently the only thing over there was a months old post on '70s bands on MySpace that i meant to star, not share.
Not doing too good on that Wordpress project, eh? If you had to create maps in Excel spreadsheets all day, you'd get bored with that nonsense too.
Ran across this review for Japrocksampler, and this bit (which follows a pretty glowing review otherwise) caught my eye:
With detailed accounts of the above incident and others, Japrocksampler stands as a pretty good social history of Japan in the '60s and '70s. However, the book will likely appeal most to serious rock music fans who will be sent into a collecting frenzy over Cope's Top 50 Japrock LPs index.
For all of its merits, it must be said that Japrocksampler is rather sloppily written and edited. There are a number of misspellings and factual errors, and Cope has a bad habit of repeating himself.
Last month, in the Times, the white folk rocker Devendra Banhart declared his admiration for R. Kelly’s new R. & B. album “Double Up.” Thirty years ago, Banhart might have attempted to imitate R. Kelly’s perverse and feather-light soul. Now he’s just a fan.
The uneasy, and sometimes inappropriate, borrowings and imitations that set rock and roll in motion gave popular music a heat and an intensity that can’t be duplicated today, and the loss isn’t just musical; it’s also about risk.
“The Song Is The Single,” which starts “You make the record at night, ’cause everyone knows that rock ’n’ roll is the language of night/But this got made in the day; it was bright.” So what’s happening here is that the language of night -- black night or white night -- is no longer available. What you come up with is awkward in the light, but seems more true. Of course, this truth, this awkwardness, has long since become a shtick, a common blah. This means that the voice has to keep searching for itself anew. Night doesn’t work, day doesn’t work. Maybe twilight.
It's odd that i was reading Cope's Japrocksampler last night, to run across this story about "melody roads" in Japan. They already realized that they had the rhythm, so on some roads, they have cut grooves so that tones can be created while driving over them. A driver can adjust the car to create a song of sorts. They are going to out-literalize the concept of motorik in Krautrock!
Nope. I don't know what the hell is going on. Yes, i do understand the forces at play, but what i mean is that i don't see any kind of sane, positive resolution for the people of Pakistan.
Musharraf is a dictator and has given aid to powers that have proven very dangerous. However, this doesn't mean Benazir Bhutto is innocent. In fact, she's a criminal.
So this is all Bush's fault... most people still reading this blog know just how much i loathe that bastard, and hold his administration responsible for many of the current foreign policy problems. Well, not entirely. This time, if the knee-jerk rightwing freaks want to scream, "It's Clinton fault!" they'd actually have a point. Entergy is involved. Oh, i loves me some Entergy...
Ugly.
Damn it to hell. You don't declare "oldest" anything without throwing out a number, even if it's pulled out of your ass. Bronze Age is kinda sketchy. I want a number estimate. Anyway, the "oldest iron workshop found" in Turkey:
ÇORUM - Anatolia News Agency
The world's oldest iron workshop has been uncovered during excavations in the central Black Sea province of Çorum and archaeologists hope the find will draw tourists to the region, the dig's leader said yesterday.
The workshop, dating back to the Bronze Age, was found in Alacahöyük, Ankara University Archaeologist Aykut Çınaroğlu, told the Anatolia news agency.
�Besides the iron workshop, some ceramic and stone pieces, as well as ornaments, were also among the findings, which reveal evidence regarding the daily lives of the Hittites,� he said, adding around 100 pieces were unearthed as part of the excavations.
In previous years, archaeologists have found a dagger with a golden handle in a prince and princess' graves at the same site, Çınaroğlu said.
The findings were handed over to the Çorum Museum, he said, adding archaeologists have restored some of the findings and displayed them for public viewing in an old museum building, located on the excavation site.
The Culture and Tourism Ministry is also planning to use king graves found in the region for tourism, a plan they call the "Alacahöyük King Graves Revival Project."
All infrastructure work for the project has been completed and awaits the ministry's approval.
�If the fund is allocated for the project, we can kick off the implementation of the project with the opening of the next excavation season. Our aim is to promote Alacahöyük, an important center for the Hittite and Hatti civilizations of (the) Bronze Age period, for culture tourism,� Çınaroğlu said.
The project is the first of its kind in Turkey and the first to display six Hatti graves in a glass bell, together with skeletons and grave gifts.
A few months back, there were some photos circulated of some poor bastard in Romania who had these bizarre horny growths covering his extremities, to the point that he could no longer feed or clean himself well. Although he seems to have reacted well to treatment, the cause of the condition remained unidentified.
It looks like a fisherman in Indonesia suffers from the same condition, only this time, a physician identifies what he probably suffers from, Human papillomavirus interacting with an extraordinarily rare genetically caused immune deficiency.
The WFMU blog comments on the second post cover a lot more ground.
Not quite finished with The Blind Owl yet, but i am a little puzzled. Pamuk says that he has read it in a few interviews with the Persian press, but barely mentions the book otherwise... or at least, that's how it appears to in the English language. He praises the book. It's not as if he dismisses it in any way. However, in reading The Blind Owl, i recognized passages that are echoed in Pamuk's work... the obsessive, hallucinatory mania that creeps in, especially The White Castle... it feels drawn straight from the scorning alienation of the wildly unhinged, but wonderfully poetic narrator of The Blind Owl.
Anyway, i gotta go finish it. Setting back up the Wordpress blog tonight is beginning to feel too much like work.
This essay by Asad Raza over on 3 Quarks Daily kinda blew me away just now. Drawing from imagery from "Brazil" and "Goodfellas," and draws from the source material for "American Gangster," to paint a very ugly, sobering picture of America today.
One sentence that i'm afraid that i will be co-opting to scrawl anywhere i can is, "Big box suburbia is an alienation factory." It's a very succinct metaphor. Fuck it. That ain't no metaphor. It's concrete fact. Raza nailed it.
Weird that it seems that Juliana Hatfield coined the phrase "alienation factory" as when i googled that alone, it turns up mostly in her song lyrics. Nicely dystopian. I never really gave her or Blake Babies a chance, and still doubt her music would suit me.
Read that essay. Edifying.
By the way, another sentence that has me grinning maniacally is, " The new frontier is the first frontier, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and our representatives act as gangster-cowboys there while we exult in the televised fictions detailing the same." I've seen that sentiment elsewhere, but i like the way that sentence is constructed.
Slashdot had a strange little piece about trojan horse malware being pre-installed on Maxtor harddrives in the factory in Thailand. One of the link on there links to a story that seems to imply that the government of China is somehow involved in the scheme, but the virus described back in September is one that deletes mp3s.
I wonder if the RIAA is finding creative new ways to fight in the digital age? It's either them or the gold farmers (as the virus also looks for game passwords and uploads them to sites in Beijing,) or possibly a joint venture.
If China wanted to create a botnet, could this be the kind of industrial sabotage and espionage that would provide an instant horde of zombies? Or fuck a botnet... if it's a harddrive with malware installed as soon as the icon is clicked, why not go for financial information or scientific research?
Maybe there'll be more about this in the coming weeks...
KHABAROVSK, November 12 (RIA Novosti) - Archaeologists have found a 15,000 year-old hunters' camp site from the Paleolithic era near Lake Evoron in Russia's Far East, a source in the Khabarovsk archaeology museum said on Monday.
"The site dates back to the end of the Ice Age, a period which is poorly studied" Andrei Malyavin, chief of the museum's archaeology department said. "That is why any new site from this period is a discovery in itself."
The site, found during a 2007 archaeological expedition to Lake Evoron, is the largest of four Stone Age sites, discovered near the Amur River so far, and was most likely established by mammoth hunters.
"We came to this conclusion after studying flint pikes, arrowheads and a stone scraper," Malyavin said, adding that a comprehensive archaeological excavation could take a couple of years.
In 2006, archaeologists discovered an Iron Age burial mound around 2,500 years old containing a unique fragment from an iron dagger, which had been preserved in the Amur Region's acidic soil.
It's interesting enough that it is a wood ring that has been preserved, which must be at least 2,500 years old, but it is Median, and from what little that i understand, that's an even more rare site to discover.
Tehran , Nov 12 : Archaeologists have discovered a unique ring belonging to the Median era (Bronze Age) in western Iran.
The Medes were an ancient Iranian people who lived in the northwestern portions of present-day Iran, and roughly the areas of present day Kurdistan, Hamedan, Tehran, Azarbaijan, Esfahan and Zanjan. This area was known in Greek as Media.
The ring, which was found in an excavation by archaeologists in Iran's western province of Loresta is carved with Farvahar, which is a symbol of Zoroastrianism.
This symbol is currently thought to represent a Fravashi (a guardian angel) and is influenced by the "winged sun " hieroglyph appearing on Bronze Age royal seals.
The ring, which is 2.5 cm in diameter, is made of a type of bronze which is an alloy of copper, tin and zinc.
The figure in the Farvahar is depicted wearing Mede attire and a hat. This man, who is shown to be long-bearded, is facing the left as he emerges from the Sun. Wide open wings ca also be seen on the two sides of his body. Two moving feet can also be seen on the ring.
Some other relics including bronze necklaces, rings and bracelets as well as metal arrows and daggers were also found during the excavation. (ANI)
Even though it might cool to have a Blood Meridian movie, i'm not sure if i could watch it myself. It had better have the dead baby tree if it gets made.
As for Ridley Scott being the director of an adaptation, i'm unconvinced. A true "Blood Meridian" would come off as complete violence pornography, ugly, unjust, debauched... more like a cross between a Jordorowsky film like "Holy Mountain" or "El Topo" and the stuff that influenced Rom Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects" than oh, let's say Scott's "Gladiatior," "Alien," or "Blade Runner." (Never seen any of that stuff that influenced Zombie. Again, I can take that kind of graphic violence in books, but not in movies.) I'm going to reject all of that though. Yes, Blood Meridian's language is violence, but i don't feel like it is violence for the sake of violence. I'd rather the director going to acid cowboy allegories of Jodorowsky than snuff porn, which Scott will likely try to do.
What would be interesting is if someone focused on the spiritual or cosmic significance of the book, someone like Guillermo del Toro. It feels like he'd get down the gnostic overtones correctly. Otherwise, it's just going to be a bigger budget, less absurd "Natural Born Killers."
Oh yeah... i haven't gotten around to seeing the "Deadwood" series yet. Don't know how that might figure into the mix.
It's weirdly satisfying when Warren Ellis plays with music writing. (I enjoy a column like this more than some of his comics.) It reminds me of the glory days of Freaky Trigger when it was the flagship of a fleet of small music blogs, before the the hype hungry mp3 blogs devoured all traffic. Pop culture naval gazing is awesome.
Still trying to think of something to say in reaction to Jess Harvell's tirade on Idolator a couple of weeks ago. Reading some of the hyping blogs has been a dirty chore, as i want to keep up with any potential developing bands, but it's boring. Music is still exciting, and a good new song can send me into opiated bliss, but i'm feeling like i'm being conned a lot of the time with mock earnestness. I love a good flash-in-the-pan, one-hit-wonder pop moment from an unknown band, but everyone playing John the Baptist to anyone who could be passed off as a potential messiah with the right marketing.... yeah, fuck that.
Now bands only really seem interesting when woven into a larger context, when played off cultural or political moments, whether it's a comic book or an election.
Nope. Don't know where to go with that, other than... Less press releases. More thought experiments.
Fuck it. I'm dumping anything remotely hyperiffic from my music RSS feed. They are weeds choking my enjoyment of music, making me doubt the sanity of the alleged tastemaking public.
Yep... as Jiroft further emerges as one of the more important centers of early civilization, the march continues for America to start a war with Iran. (Here's some photos of the Konar-Sandal site.) Bush would probably direct tactical nukes on the site, just because he's a clueless asshole. Kermān Province seems to be economically important.
On the bright side, i ran across this post this morning dissecting how disingenuously misleading that Zogby poll is that declares that 52% of Americans support an airstrike on Iran to prevent it acquiring nuclear capabilities. No, "disingenuously misleading" is not quite right... it's more like an outright lie. Read that post. Zogby is a shill for the strange hawkish forces that continue to mire the U.S. in losing wars, destroying our military and needlessly creating new enemies.
I've never heard of her previously, but just ordered Dreams and Stones based on this piece about her book Flaw. The reviewer compares Magdalena Tulli's work to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Bruno Schulz, which has to be some kind of trifecta.
Archipelago Books puts out some beautiful looking books. Regardless over my freakout of the word hymenoptera, the translation of Gombrowicz's Bacacay flowed very well for me. I actually trust Bill Johnston's interpretation.
What's with the Polish kick for me anyway? Don't forget about Poland, man.
Whether there is music hidden in Da Vinci's "The Last Music" is not something that i would venture to make a judgment on. (No, there isn't, but it would be very cool.) The statement by the man claims to have deciphered this rumored encrypted music though, bugs me.
"A new figure emerges -- he wasn't a heretic like some believe," Pala said. "What emerges is a man who believes, a man who really believes in God."
The murals are the exciting bit for me.
By Marco Aquino
LIMA (Reuters) - A 4,000-year-old temple filled with murals has been unearthed on the northern coast of Peru, making it one of the oldest finds in the Americas, a leading archaeologist said on Saturday.
The temple, inside a larger ruin, includes a staircase that leads up to an altar used for fire worship at a site scientists have called Ventarron, said Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva, who led the dig.
It sits in the Lambayeque valley, near the ancient Sipan complex that Alva unearthed in the 1980s. Ventarron was built long before Sipan, about 2,000 years before Christ, he said.
"It's a temple that is about 4,000 years old," Alva, director of the Museum Tumbas Reales (Royal Tombs) of Sipan, told Reuters by telephone after announcing the results of carbon dating at a ceremony north of Lima sponsored by Peru's government.
"What's surprising are the construction methods, the architectural design and most of all the existence of murals that could be the oldest in the Americas," he said.
Lambayeque is 472 miles from Lima, Peru's capital.
Discoveries at Sipan, an administrative and religious center of the Moche culture, have included a gold-filled tomb built 1,700 years ago for a pre-Incan king.
Peru is rich in archaeological treasures, including the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in the Andes. Until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s, the Incas ruled an empire for several centuries that stretched from Colombia and Ecuador in the north to what are now Peru and Chile in the south.
"The discovery of this temple reveals evidence suggesting the region of Lambayeque was one of great cultural exchange between the Pacific coast and the rest of Peru," said Alva.
All i can note are my own personal observations. I have no expertise obviously.
When we were in Austin, i saw a lot of Ron Paul signs in yards and along roads. They were the only political group to stake out a patch of ground in front of the Austin City Limits Festival and proselytize (although i did see a few Obama stickers on backpacks.) I just chalked the signs up to the libertarian technology community in Austin.
It's November and i live in Hammond, Louisiana. The only presidential campaign signs that i've seen up in town are Ron Paul signs. We walk through neighborhoods downtown, and there in front of a lot of well-upkept homes, although i've noticed that they are more prominent in mixed race neighborhoods, which is a little disturbing.
Ron Paul scares the shit out of me. I'm seeing the Clinton and Giuliani match-up as inevitable, but the Ron Paul factor is spooky. He doesn't seem to be part of the predetermined equation between two self-entitled political machines, but he doesn't seem to be a force for good either. Few of the people who are disgusted with the establishment seem to be grasping the danger of Ron Paul though.
Two local blogs, Your Right Hand Thief and Library Chronicles have tackled the Ron Paul phenomenon. Library Chronicles has covered how Paul is making an impact in New Orleans. Paul's Louisiana profile is important to me, as we are a relatively political backwater, so nationally something more powerful must be on the move, but he also nails something that has been coalescing in my head:
My model stars Rudy! Giuliani as the ghoulish authoritarian Nixon, Hillary Clinton as the bumbling centrist Hubert Humphrey, and Paul as the insurgent x-factor George Wallace. In '68 Wallace's run exposed a dangerous fault in the old Democratic "New Deal" coalition splintering the working class populist vote along racial and social lines and ushering in a major political realignment which appears to have peaked with the rise and... perhaps... fall of the Rovian neo-cons currently ruining our Constitution and pretty much blowing up the world.
17 year old Bianca Passarge of Hamburg dresses up as a cat, complete with furry tail and dances on wine bottles, June 1958. Her performance was based on a dream and she practiced for eight hours every day in order to perfect her dance. Photo: Carlo Polito/BIPs/Getty Images
Why is Batman laughing? When a post starts with a question about Frank Miller's All-Star Batman, i really wasn't expecting it to go such fantastic places, back to Judex (who i haven't heard of) and Fantomas (who i have.) Just awesome.
Obviously i need to track down the Judex serials. If they inspired André Breton and Luis Buñuel, they're good enough for me.
There was a little revelation at the end of this great post on the story "Borges & I" for me, as it had not occurred to me either.
The last line of “Borges and I” famously ends with the sentence, “I do not know which of us has written this page.”
It hadn’t occurred to me before but by the time that Borges composed that line he had already gone blind. So, in the physical sense of writing, he actually did not write that line. It was written by someone else, the person listening to him.
There is probably a connection between the postal service forcing periodicals to pay for their overhead in American history, which will cause many periodicals to go out of business, and the threat to eliminate Net Neutrality.
The internet will be blamed for killing periodicals, but the internet is in little better shape, as it's about to be throttled for anyone who isn't a multi-billion dollar corporation. The limit of the freedom of the press will only go so far as what you can hand out in the street, and that will be monitored by cameras.
Tie this into the FCC wanting monopolies to run rampant in local markets in newspapers, television, and radio, and it's even more obvious.
Don't tell me that this is not a coordinated effort to shut down every public forum of discourse.
All of that email about translation (yep. there's more... ) earlier also set me on a tangent on classification, and obviously, I wound up landing on the Borges essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins." It didn't really help much, but it was fun to read again, in that frame of mind.
Also, although i allegedly read Hume in college, i don't recall running across this sentence before.
"The world is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died" ('Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion', V. 1779)
Bill responds to my fixation on the use of the word hymenoptera in Gombrowicz's "The Events on the Banbury":
The whole hymenoptera issue would have completely evaded my attention if you had not mentioned it. Yet another example of things I don't know anything about. The larger question on whether or not editors, translators, or writers do most of the fucking up is an interesting one. For myself, if I like an author, I ususally blame the translator (unless of course I like the translator, in which case I blame the
editor...). If I don't care, I assume the author is at fault. This particular case is an interesting one...
Say Gombrowicz DID get the name wrong. The translator is of course obliged to translate the text in front of him. An editor gets it and catches the error (unlikely as that is). Does he change it? Is he obligated? Is he allowed? Suppose Gombrowicz made the "error" on purpose. Suppose it was designed to be a way to lead the attentive and intelligent reader astray. Suppose it is just nonsense. How can
you tell (especially in this case where an author is dead)? As an editor, what do you do?
I'm so absurdly late on this that's it's nearly pointless, but i just saw this X-Force cover for the very first time. I read all of the X-force/X-statix in trade paperback
Tea and oranges? Is this a reference to Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne"?
Since Mr. Sensitive is essentially a stand-in Kurt Cobain, is this his Leonard Cohen afterworld of "Pennyroyal Tea?"
Yeah, probably... i just often see connections that aren't there though.
Part of the reason why i'm having trouble finishing a book now is because i'm stuck on finishing Witold Gombrowicz's Bacacay. It's not an inaccessible book. Kat picked it up on the drive back from Austin, reading the first story quickly, and has been intrigued ever since. (She's waiting for me to finish before she dives into it, although i'm urging her to try other authors first.) There are some great stories, and even better ideas in there, but i keep finding them overlong, and become impatient with his lack of immediacy. Obviously, i have no problem with long books, but i don't like like short stories to be overly ornate. Bacacay is a good read, but i doubt whether i'll engage him in a full novel.
It seems that the translator is doesn't know his entomology. A scorpion is not a member of hymenoptera. It's done in the story "The Events on the Banbury.” Hymenoptera is the order for ants, wasps, and bees.... all insects. A scorpion is an archanid, more closely related to spiders. They actually belong to a different subphylum altogether, Chelicerata, while insects are in Hexapoda..... distant cousins evolutionarily. Eh, it's just taxonomy, right?
But why is hymenoptera used? Probably it's because both wasps and scorpions sting. Why is this important to me? Because it makes me suspect that the translator is possibly being purple or lazy. It makes me doubt everything that Gombrowicz has written. Did Gombrowicz, the narrator or the translator use the word hymenoptera? What other words am i missing the significance of or interpreting too much into?
Please remember that i'm a college dropout who majored in biology, and am no expert in either literature or entomology. This obsession over one word is petty and obsessive. Nonetheless, that one word choice has me in a doubting frenzy now.
(Shit. Was it actually the word hymenoteran that was used? The book's not handy to reference at the moment.)
Not quite. I've gone through so many fallow periods since 2000, that they're rather hard to keep track of. However, it sunk in that this blogger site has been up for far too long, and it doesn't really feel like home. I keep promising to assemble the Wordpress site, but it's been hell paring down that database from all of the spam. At this point, i'm missing the ancient pure HTML site from Geocities.
To hell with this. I must put up a brand new blog in Wordpress, lest i forget why this format was useful in the first place.
